He really played that character so well that he created the "villain you love to hate" to perfection. That made the "good guys" stand out and the entire series a success.
I remember a line from a Belmondo movie, which went approximately as: "What I want to achieve is to first become immortal and then die". He certainly did achieve his immortality.
Precisely. The floodgates were about to open and they had to stop that from happening at all costs.
I saw some replies mentioning WSL and the general fact that Microsoft does not care about the desktop anymore.
Agreed, does not care about the _consumer_ desktop anymore, but the _corporate_ desktop is still a pretty serious cash cow.
I can see the difference between the Windows I am forced to use at work and the version that is available on consumer laptops.
Same with Office. If may not bring a lot of revenue directly from consumers, but it does bring a lot of revenue from corporate users.
Is the corporate desktop that Microsoft wants to keep Linux off.
It is also the place where the OS is installed by paid IT guys, not the individual users.
In such environments, you can have switches measured in the thousands of desktops at one time (Munich had about 20,000 if I remember correctly)
In the consumer market about 1% of the users even bother to change the default browser settings, let alone re-install the OS.
In the early days of Linux when the market share was listed at around 0.5% I was surprised to see it that high.
It meat that 1 user in 200 was actually re-installing the OS.
The purpose of the original lawsuit started in 2003 was never to "win" anything.
Remember that it was Microsoft who bankrolled it in the first place, and the fact that the lawsuit started in the year 2003 is no coincidence.
2004 was declared the much-derided "Year of the Linux Desktop", and it was correct; Linux had become good enough to use on the desktop in any corporation. (I've been using Linux since 1998).
Just look at the Munich Linux migration as an example.
Microsoft desperately needed some way to convince the MBAs running corporations to keep Linux off the desktop as cloud and Azure were not a thing back in 2004.
They found it in the form of legal risk; use Linux, get sued.
Back in 2003 it created quite a stir, with AutoZone and BMW being directly sued by SCO for their use of Linux.
Almost all potential corporate users got spooked, as the lawsuits got widely publicized.
A few generations of MBAs graduated learning that Linux is a legal risk, and now, even if Linux runs the entire infrastructure of most corporations, you are allowed to access it only via a text terminal.
In 2026 Microsoft has captured all the corporate e-mail market (all of it hosted on Azure by now) via some well-publicized data breaches of in-house servers at the beginning of Nadella's reign.
Most of their revenue is from the cloud, but they still want Linux off the desktop.
What people use at work will want to use at home as well.
Therefore, there will be attempts to keep this lawsuit going for as long as possible.
I remember reading his articles in the late 90's and I have to admit that I got to like his style.
The one I remember the most (which unfortunately I cannot locate anymore) is an article about, well, the 90's.
The gist of it was "good riddance to the 90s". He was particularly critical of the wars of that decade in which high-tech, remote-controlled weapons were just starting to appear.
Therefore he referred to them as "the joystick wars". Too bad the term did not catch on on mainstream media.
No, I think this is along the lines "our products are too good to let you use them".
The LLMs have reached the asymptote and now the next hype cycle is needed.
And this cycle seems to be "our models think on their own", hence more capex needed to train them.
The timing of the announcement, coming right after this:
https://www.tomshardware.com/t...
is definitely suspicious. Especially since Kimi 3 is a lot cheaper to use than OpenAI's models.
Why 2003? Let's see if you can figure this one out.
Hint: SCO
Also, are you familiar with events like:
- Steve Balmer taking a trip to Munich (back in 2003)
- Ken Brown's report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
- Names like Darl McBride, Laura DiDio, Maureen O'Gara?
If you were, then you would be able to understand why today Linux is allowed to be used in corporate settings, but only via the text console, never on the desktop.
AMD bought ATI 20 years ago, back in 2006, to be the first company (or was it VIA first?) to have an integrated CPU-GPU offering.
They kept on talking about HSA 1.0 which would make it possible to pass pointers between the CPU and the GPU without the need to copy the actual data between the main memory and the graphics memory.
I cannot find the original reference, but I still found these:
https://hothardware.com/news/h...
https://forums.anandtech.com/t...
What happened after that? AMD stopped publishing any drivers that would allow running OpenCL on their APUs.
They actively blocked programmers from accessing the part that provides 99% of the processing power, just as Nvidia was taking off.
Obviously everyone working on AI flocked to CUDA and now that platform is entrenched.
Look at the HSA Foundation now, their most recent "news" are from 2020:
https://hsafoundation.com/
I wonder where we would be now if developers had the possibility to run OpenCL on the APUs of their laptops.
"The record comes as the observatory faces the risk of having its funding cut."
So, if the research shows record levels of CO2, the answer is simple: stop the research!
It reminds me of a quote from a computer game back in the 90's (it may have been Goblins):
"Too fat? No problem! Buy a thinning mirror!"
I'm sure that DRM-controlled coffee pods: https://www.coffeesexploration... reduce the risk even more.
They will even reduce the risk of hair loss and impotence, not to talk about the risk of personal bankruptcy.
And if I buy a subscription to DRMd coffee pods will even prevent my car from breaking down (even though I don't have a car)
A few days ago I got a message from Google informing me that they are forcing Gemini on Android devices.
As expected, I was informed that Gemini will slurp up everything I do on the Android tablet to "better something, something".
I don't think I'm the only one who thinks that the value of the AI chatbots is in the information that people reveal about themselves.
When spying on websites, users can only click on what is presented to them. On the other hand, keeping users engaged in a "conversation" will make them reveal information that the designers of the website did not think of.
Google being in the personal data business have the greatest need to slurp up as many conversations with the chatbots as possible, so they will try to grab marketshare from OpenAI.
It is known that mosquitoes locate humans by tracking the carbon dioxide that humans release:
https://www.sciencenewstoday.o...
Beer bubbles are nothing but carbon dioxide bubbles, so carrying around an open can/bottle of beer is nothing more than carrying around a homing beacon for mosquitoes.
"
Why do they need staff? Can't they use generative AI to write the code?
In the meantime I'll ask ChatGPT to help me paint the fence in the garden.
The big studios are out of ideas when it comes to movies as the requirement is blockbusters only.
Smaller movies which do not deal with saving the world are not allowed.
There is a reason a series like "Trailer Park Boys" was not made in Hollywood.
Therefore, the bean counters that run the studios are now mandating that only movies that have shown commercial success in the past are allowed to be produced in the form of re-makes.
Re-imaging old movies instead of actually re-making them reduces costs and promises higher return-to-investment ratios.
The "Chinese Studios" doing the re-imaging is certainly not for their internal market, it must be at Hollywood's bidding. All the movies they plan to re-image have had commercial success in the West and it is definitely cheaper to outsource the re-imaging to the Chinese studios.
As for the post here on
" which turned Li into a bone fide movie star"
if is actually "bona fide": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...
which turned Li into a bone fide movie star
No amount of genius can overcome a preoccupation with detail.
